Harvard Writing Center’s Jane Rosenzweig on AI and Writing

In 2022, Jane Rosenzweig published an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “What We Lose When Machines Do the Writing”—the first of several she’s produced about artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT. The director of the Harvard College Writing Center and a longtime Expository Writing instructor (who in 2023 helped launch a nonprofit newspaper, The Belmont Voice, in her suburban town), Rosenzweig has spent most of her life thinking about writing. At her Pittsburgh high school, she was a student writing tutor, work that she loved: “It’s this collaboration, where you’re trying to build a bridge for someone from what’s on the page to the ideas they’re trying to work out in their head—the very thing AI can’t do.” Later, she studied history (at Yale, then Oxford), envisioning a career as a professor, until an internship at The Atlantic altered her path. After editorial stints there and at the now-defunct Improper Bostonian—and with an M.F.A. from Iowa—she arrived at Harvard in 2000. “I want students to see that writing is a way of figuring out what they think, finding a structure for their thoughts so they can see them more clearly,” she says, “of trying to answer questions that they don’t already know the answers to.” For her, the issue isn’t whether AI is “good” or “bad,” but whether it helps students develop as writers and thinkers. (“I don’t think we know yet,” she says.) Since 2023, she has taught an Expos course, “To What Problem Is ChatGPT the Solution?” Students learn how generative AI works and examine its effects on education, creativity, democracy, inequality, and work. In their final project, they adapt their research papers into op-eds, which they submit for publication, so they, too, “can have a voice in the national conversation.”